62 replies to this topic

[TDS]

Farm Engine

Introduction

This engine is something I've always wanted to do, but due to lack or resources and knowledge it has always fallen low on priority list.

It is basically just as the name suggest a series of script designed to allow you to create a farming game using RPG Maker VX Ace.

Completed Features
- Time System.
- Crops (Planting, watering, growing etc).

Features in progress
- Settings structure.
- Tools.
- Global events (Livestock, NPC's, etc).

Screenshots



Demo
https://dl.dropbox.c...Farm Engine.exe

The new icons in the demo were made by Petangonbuddy, if you are going to use them ask for her permission.

-Crop & Livestock event structures. And by this I mean various examples about how to go about the growth of events and how they would respond to tools.
-Graphics for tool use and seed packets.

FAQ
- Empty.



Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

Edited by TDS, 09 August 2012 - 09:43 PM.

[PentagonBuddy]

Have you thought about how to handle livestock? I've played several Harvest Moon games so I could give you ideas about how to make a HM clone moreso than features common to farming sims as a whole. OTL

Related to the above, the relationship levels with your livestock often affect the quality of product you get. But yeah, if you don't have any concrete ideas about how livestock will work, I will gladly vomit up information about how the HM series usually handles it. Crops look really solid and the way you have them set up in the carrot example doesn't look too confusing to me, personally. Edit: I also know enough Ruby so that that doesn't look like a wall of OH GOD CONFIGURATION CODE SETTINGS, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.

I also volunteer myself to help with any graphics you need! Jalen as well, she knows how to make tiles in case you need some specifically for this. (and also she is okay with me volunteering her, I checked!) Someday we'd like to make a game with farming as a central element, so this is of interest to the both of us.

[Celianna]

You're already using my farm tiles, so go ahead, I don't mind if you post them here. Just mention they're mine I set them up so that there's 16 different crops, from tiled land, to seeded land, to three different stages of growth, and then all of them have a watered version.

As for livestock, perhaps it would be nice if you could set up grass that will be eaten by livestock in the field, and it regrows over time. Or you could cut it yourself to store up some food as well.

[ShinGamix]

If you have ever played harvest moon magical melody I am sure you can add a ton of things from that.

[TDS]

@PentagonBuddy:
I did not have solid groundwork for livestock yet, so more information is always helpful. I was thinking of doing it using master events on a map that would act as the base for their behavior.

Also, thank you very much for the offer. Since you are not confused by the settings would you be interested in trying a small demo of the farming system?

@Celianna:

Well thank you, as for the grass and livestock, that would fall under the behavior in their master event.

@ShinGamix:
The last harvest moon game I played was Friends of mineral town, so my knowledge of farming games is very limited.

And thank you all for your interest, I was thinking no one would be interested in a farming engine and I would have to drop again.

[Shaz]

This looks really nice. I don't have any plans to USE something like this right now, but I like farming games, so I'd PLAY something made with it.

[PentagonBuddy]

Sure, I'd be happy to test a demo. As for livestock...

They were pretty basic in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. You had chickens, cows, sheep, and a horse but the horse was more of a specialty animal used mainly for transportation. You fed your animals and could pick them up/talk to them/brush them to increase their affection level. In general, if your livestock liked you more then you got a better product from them. Chickens and cow would produce STUFF once per day (you just picked up chicken eggs that were lying around, and milked cows), and sheep could be sheared every...uh I think every 2 weeks. If you left them out in bad weather they'd get upset and might get sick. Chickens reproduced when you stuck an egg in the incubator, and cows/sheep would become pregnant when you used a miracle potion on them.

A Wonderful Life was much more involved! You had different breeds of cows that produced different qualities of milk, animals could be male or female, and cows would stop producing milk after a certain amount of days until you got them pregnant. Chicken eggs would be unfertilized unless there was a male chicken in the coop; then there was a chance that fertilized eggs would show up. NO MIRACLE POTIONS HERE, ANIMALS HAVE OFF-SCREEN SEX

I've played Magical Melody and Save the Homeland, too, but I can't recall them doing much beyond the basic livestock stuff.

[deilin]

You ever thought of going rune factory or pleasant life direction? Raise monsters to aid in battle while cave exploring.

[Dr.Yami]

OH WELL WHAT! We are gonna have a Harvest Moon features in VX ACE <3. Nice concept TDS

[starcrescendo]

Like somebody mentioned, the best farming sim is the Harvest Moon series so I would use some of their ideas as a base. I don't think the sample code you provided would be too difficult to use, and this is coming from someone who doesn't do anything scripting wise. However, I thought that the new notetags thing was supposed to make things easier on scripters and users, maybe there's a way that we could create items for all the seeds we want, etc. and then assign notetags like [seasons:spring,summer] [grow:100] [growvariance:10] [value:20] [valuevariance:50] or something like that. (I have never used notetags so excuse my ignorance if that's not what they're for.)

As far as featues go I would suggest:

• Different seasons where certain crops grow (didn't know if you had this funcitonality already when you said "Time System") also temperatures would be cool too, as well as weather like rain, hail, sprinkles, etc.
• I know its cruel, and personally I don't really know if I would like this, but just a thought, what about in addition to getting produce, being able to push the animals into a special building and then get meat for them? It might be too realisitic and sad so maybe you could just have the animal when it pops out eggs everyday, have it pop out a chicken leg or or thigh that you can sell. Or to keep the balance in the game, maybe you use an item on the animal to determine if it will be a produce animal and come out with eggs every day, or a consumable animal and come out with a piece of meat every 30 days or something.
• More animals! (although I'm sure once you built the framework we would be able to add our own animals so maybe just focus on "animal types" for example there are "pet animals" like dogs, cats, and birds, then consumables types as I mentioned above, and then produce animals like cows and chickens) this way, you could add pigs, fish, turkey, etc.
• Maybe you could approach animals the same as crops where you don't make the animals themselves, you make their properties and then we set configuration options like "this animal will give item X every Y days"
• Different types of seeds (flowers, fruits, and vegetables) as well as "classes" of seeds, like typical vegetables, root vegetables, trees, etc.
• It would be cool if there were more varieties of levels. Like A+ through F-. For example, its almost impossible to get an A, because quality is constantly changing if its a warm day and you water the plants in the high noon sun, they're going to not be as good, etc. If you skip a day, they will take longer to grow, and they won't be as good at the end of it.

I wanted to do something like this a while ago (but have no scripting ability) so I gave up. But I remember being able to get pretty far with the basic aspects of it using the XAS system for RPG Maker XP so you might want to look at that: http://xasabs.wordpress.com/ (Moghunter). (My attempt was all evented though, I don't know how hard XAS is to work with in scripting.) Also, I remember there being a harvest moon starter kit somewhere but I didn't have it earmarked. However, a quick search came up with this Dynamic Gardening system which may be of interest to you: http://www.rmxpunlim...amic-gardening/ (ForeverZer0)

Good luck with this! There are a ton of Harvest Moon fans waiting to call you their king if you make this!

Edited by starcrescendo, 18 March 2012 - 09:06 AM.

[TDS]

@PentagonBuddy:
Sounds like wonderful life stepped it up a notch when it came to livestock, I'm going to have to read more about it to see how
to spread out more the parameters of the livestock.


@deilin:
I've heard of rune factory but I have never played it, as for pleasant life I have no idea. Monsters I guess would fall under the global
event categories if they affect the farm.

@Yami:
If I can get over the hurdle of making all these settings user friendly the hopefully yes, farming in VX Ace.


@starcrescendo:
In this instance notetags would hinder the creation of crops more than help them. As for the settings in the sample code, that is just
the settings for 1 month in a crop, if a crop or a game has let's say 12 months with different settings for each month, you could be looking
at over 100 lines of code just in settings. With that amount of code it is very easy to lose track of settings and just get frustrated if a
bug pops up.

As for your suggestions:

Temperature sounds nice but it also feels like it falls under the seasons/month area, too many parameters for growth could start to get
confusing fast.

Butchering animals is probably something best done from a menu where you select the animal you want to butcher and having it being sent
to a butcher for processing.

Yeah, once you are able to create 1 animal you can make as many types as you want. The only limitations would be on having the graphics
for that animal.

I have not yet decided how settings for animals will work, I was thinking of them being set as part of a special event that all animals
of that type would read for their behaviour and settings. Like having a blank map where you have an event for cows and chickens and
livestock in other maps would use those events as their base.

Seeds would fall under events controlled by the player.

Not sure what you mean by that last one.

And thank you for your comment/suggestions everyone.

[kirinelf]

I'm guessing his last bit was regarding crop quality. If you water a plant that doesn't need it, it causes waterlogging (At least, in poorly aerated soil) and that drowns the roots, which also need oxygen. Conversely, not watering plants and assuming rain is enough when it isn't results in heat stress, which is also bad. In small amounts, both won't kill the plant, but the quality of the fruit will definitely be affected. Then there's the matter of soil quality; growing crops near a river means you don't need to water often, but a beach with sandy soils is bad for most types of growth. Then the environment you're growing your crops in will affect both the plant itself and any pests and parasites that are living around the area. And don't forget fertilizer. Yadda yadda.

tl;dr: TMI if you wanna keep it relatively simple. Soil type can definitely be fun though; growing stuff in waterlogged areas will lower the yield of one type of plant (Say most types of cereal/grain plants) while increasing the yield of plants that like water (like rice).

[TDS]

@kirinelf:
Some of those things should be possible with the way the engine currently works, and the soil already has properties that would be used to affect the crops.

Also something I should have mentioned before, although the engine is a series of scripts geared towards farming, this is more of a set of tools for people to use rather than scripts that will do everything for them. It will require eventing knowledge to make the engine work to your liking and ideas.

Tools for example can be evented and scripted using the same commands, also things such as randomly destroying crops after a storm or watering crops automatically during rain can be done from an event with a simple script call.

Like this:

$game_map.all_map_farm_soil.each_value {|s| s.water_fully}

That would make it so it so all the farm soil on the the current map is watered.

Once I finish implementing the month/seasons settings I'll see if I can find someone to go through the settings to make them more user friendly, like adjusting the names of methods to avoid confusion about their purpose which is still my biggest worry with this engine.

[Jaide]

Ooh, this interests me very much. I don't know a whole lot about coding, but I'd still be happy to test and help out where I can. I love farming games.

[yieldingmydestiny]

I'd like to see this completed to the point where it would boast massive structure and functionality like Yanfly Engine Melody did.

[fizzly]

This is so cool! [subscribed] Always wanted to make Harvest Moon fangame, but still using just events (not too cool, i'm limited with amount of crops/field rectangles), so I would appreciate if you will finish this. Anyway, I think I can help with the features (played HM much!)

* Basics
- you can water also tilled land without seeds and mature crops (ready to harvest)
- if you plant seeds on watered field, ground stay wet
- you can remove planted seeds with hoe (also hammer?)
- you can remove immature plants with sickle
- crops are dying if not watered after couple of days?
* Tools (field)
- watering can - to water crops (configurable water amount [variable]; if 0, then you need to fill it near water)
- hoe - to till ground
- hammer - to break stones on the field
- axe - to cut down branches from field
- sickle - to remove weeds from field

Edited by fizzly, 22 March 2012 - 12:23 PM.

[TDS]

@jaide:
Well, PentagonBuddy is working out perfectly for testing and work. But if there is a need for other testers I'll let you know.

* Basics
- you can water also tilled land without seeds and mature crops (ready to harvest) Already done
- if you plant seeds on watered field, ground stay wet Already done
- you can remove planted seeds with hoe (also hammer?) Doable with tool events
- you can remove immature plants with sickle Doable with tool events
- crops are dying if not watered after couple of days? Already done

Tools will basically be up to the creator of the game, since this is a farming engine and not a harvest moon starter kit. But all the tools you mentioned should be easily doable with common events as well with scripts. I will only provide the methods to make your own tools.

I'll see if I can post a short demo of the tools and crops when I get VX Ace, but don't get your hopes up on that happening soon.

[fizzly]

Tools will basically be up to the creator of the game, since this is a farming engine and not a harvest moon starter kit. But all the tools you mentioned should be easily doable with common events as well with scripts. I will only provide the methods to make your own tools.

That's even better if you ask me

[kirinelf]

I might have missed this somewhere, but how are you keeping track of time? I remember I tried to make a small farming system in RMVX with events, and I couldn't come up with a decent way of measuring time. Say I want a crop to be ready for harvest in ten RL minutes. How do I go about doing that? What if I go into another map? Stuff like that. There's probably a way that involves storing the current game time in a variable and then periodically checking it, but I have no idea how.

So yeah. How are you doing that?

[TDS]

I'm not, this engine works on an end on the day method which processes all of the crops on daily basis. It's not impossible to have a crop grow based on a specific amount of time, but that would mean checking each crop against it's growth parameters per frame which at 10 minutes comes out at 36000 checks per crop and let's say for a small farm of 30 crops that is a grand total of 1080000 checks per frame.

It would just lag a game down to oblivion or only allow you to have very small farms without lag.